DJ W!ld: Dirty
Cabin Fever

Dirty is Guillaume Duchastel de Montrouge's more-than-credible follow-up to his DJ W!LD debut artist album Palace, which W Records issued last summer. As the new album's title makes clear, the Dijon-born DJ specializes in a raw and underground brand of body music that's definitely floor-filling, but it's artful, too, specifically in its incorporation of well-placed samples. He brings years of experience to the project, having performed in major clubs in Paris and New York and, as one of the leading DJs in the underground gay scene in Europe, has provided soundtracks for fashion shows for Thierry Mugler, Christian Lacroix, and Vivienne Westwood.

W!LD sprinkles a handful of short bits throughout the album rather than have it be one long-form jam after another. But such pieces are obviously incidental to the release, brief stopping points before the main acts take the stage. So while field recordings-based vignettes such as “Apres La Plage” and “Ça Scotche” aren't unwelcome, they're basically window dressing for thumpers like “Voyage” and “Ficou Loco.” W!LD's no fool—he recognizes that a track can't be just a groove only, no matter how powerful, and so individualizes the tracks with inspired touches. The bass-powered “Voyage,” for example, spices up its beat pattern with an Indian speaker's musings upon spirituality, while “Dream of Me” drapes robotic voice treatments and a soulful house vocal (“Late at night / When you go to sleep / Visions of me / You will see”) across its churning pulse.

He's a bit of a minimalist, too, in that he derives maximum mileage from a small number of elements, such as a snare's echo or a hi-hat accent that turns the beat around. It's his elastic, rolling house grooves that are the album's major selling point, however (one track's even titled “Beats”), and they never sound better than during “All I Want Is U,” one of the album's most incendiary cuts. His mastery of the form is clearly shown in the relentless drive of its slinky hi-hats and pounding kick drums. The title track is, predictably, the most overtly sexual of the fifteen tracks, with W!LD lathering his crisp base with a series of sensual moans and lascivious come-ons, while the slamming “Remember” points the album in the direction of acid-house. It is, admittedly, a long album at seventy-three minutes, and W!LD might have been better to have shaved it down a tad. But those with a taste for deep and long-form house grooves will derive no small amount of satisfaction from the collection.

June 2012